Lost hard drive space

Hello! If the storage tab over at About This Mac isn't cutting it, use an app like DaisyDisk to figure out what's eating the space. http://www.daisydiskapp.com/

(Free app, click the black [download] button.

First understand what OTHER is:

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202867

You probably do not want to 'clear out' other.

As a guess, reindex Spotlight and see if that makes a difference:

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716

Ciao.

I've read 3 or 4 similar posts and it seems to be an issue with Yosemite and of course, I'm facing it too. Did you find any solution yet? All the cleared space is added to the 'other' section in disk usage section (About this Mac). It's really ******* me off.

VS511 wrote:

I've read 3 or 4 similar posts and it seems to be an issue with Yosemite and of course, I'm facing it too. Did you find any solution yet? All the cleared space is added to the 'other' section in disk usage section (About this Mac). It's really ******* me off.

Why is it angering you so much? It isn't actually eating up your disk space, right? It's just a bug if anything. Try to determine what "other" actually is made up of.

The computer is having a misconception about the available space - that's what's annoying. It's a bug, sure but the computer actually thinks it only has that much space i.e. if I fill the 'supposed' free space up, I'll have no more space. Also, programs like Daisy Disk seem to shrink my Macintosh HD space itself once I clear off the space. So for e.g., instead of showing the total space as 120GB, they show it as 74GB in my case such that the empty space is constant. If I clear more space, they will shrink the Macintosh HD to even less say 70GB if I delete 4GB worth of data.

I've tried re-indexing, deleting time machine local snapshots and so forth but no solution yet.

I hope I was clear.

Thanks for explaining 🙂

Something from the top of my head: do you have FileVault enabled?

No, I don't have it enabled. It caused too much issues with the guest mode so I turned it off.

And now, my harddisk has decided to take forever to empty itself! Anyway, I'll try the tip and let you know.

Not sure if you got this fixed, but I this issue and finally figured out - so I wanted to share what I did, in hopes it helps anyone else who Googles this topic.

Basically, I was missing about 100GB of space on my SSD. Disk Utility, Get Info, and DaisyDisk were all telling me different answers about how much disk space I had on my 256GB SSD (2013 Mac Book Air running Yosemite). I only had about 90GB used, but instead of having roughly 160GB available, everything was telling me I had only 59-70GB left. I knew this was way wrong.

I tried Repair in Disk Utility, disabling and re-enabling Time Machine, re-booting, and a bunch of other stuff I read online that might help. Nothing did.

What *finally* worked - luckily I had some cheap old USB drives around to make this possible:

1) Backed up my important files to an external drive in case this all failed, and I had to "nuke and pave" everything. Disconnected that drive and set it aside.

2) Connected a different empty external drive, and made a bootable backup of my MacBook Air's SSD with SuperDuper (I expect Carbon Copy Cloner would work too). Takes a while - watch a baseball game or something, and come back later.

3) After that was made, I kept that drive connected, and in System Preferences I set that as the Startup Disk, then rebooted into that drive.

4) Now when I booted up from the external drive, I ran Repair in Disk Utility on the MacBook Air's SSD.

Something about running Disk Utility from the external drive must have made a difference, because it found a bunch of weird things and fixed them.

5) Once done, go to System Preferences, set Startup Disk back to the SSD again.

6) Reboot

And, voila, there was my 100GB back again.

Your mileage may vary, and of course backup twice before you try this... but it worked for me. Best of luck!